Inside India newsletter: Anthropic curbs ignite AI debate in India — efforts 'too slow, way too small'

Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to the latest edition of " Inside India " — your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world's fastest-growing large economy. While the U.S. and China have been racing to develop a sovereign artificial intelligence stack, India was confident of making its mark by building the AI application layer on top of foreign foundational models. But now New Delhi is being pushed to rethink its strategy as Washington moves to restrict certain AI offerings. Any thoughts on today's newsletter? Share them with the team. The big story India's artificial intelligence strategy was simple: become an AI innovation hub by leveraging its vast information technology talent to develop applications using foreign foundational models. But the fragility of that ambition was exposed last week when Anthropic disabled access to its new models— Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — for foreign nationals, complying with an export-control directive from the U.S. government. "The fact that frontier access can vanish overnight on a foreign government's order is the whole problem," Saket Dandotia, co-founder and chief executive at Onetab.ai, told CNBC. Anthropic's suspension of access could have broken Dandotia's business of making AI applications for enterprises had he not diversified across multiple models. …